Re:Git Commands You Probably Do Not Need
by coldpie on Monday January 23, 2023 @09:34AM
(#34489191)
> om my experience the circles of "complains about git" and "read the manual properly" barely touch
Yuuup. For anyone reading this who thinks of Git as a bunch of magic commands, go read all of gittutorial, gittutorial-2 and gitcore-tutorial. That last one is particularly important to read & follow along with. It gives you Git's underlying data model, which makes it much easier to reason about what the UI-level commands are doing.
I even used that knowledge once to recover my boss's lost data at a previous job! He had git-added a new file, and then lost it (git-clean/git-reset/something) before committing. I knew from reading that tutorial that git-add is sufficient to add it to git's object store, so we managed to find the right object using file timestamps and git-cat-file to retrieve it.
Yuuup. For anyone reading this who thinks of Git as a bunch of magic commands, go read all of gittutorial, gittutorial-2 and gitcore-tutorial. That last one is particularly important to read & follow along with. It gives you Git's underlying data model, which makes it much easier to reason about what the UI-level commands are doing.
I even used that knowledge once to recover my boss's lost data at a previous job! He had git-added a new file, and then lost it (git-clean/git-reset/something) before committing. I knew from reading that tutorial that git-add is sufficient to add it to git's object store, so we managed to find the right object using file timestamps and git-cat-file to retrieve it.
https://git-scm.com/docs/gittutorial
https://git-scm.com/docs/gittutorial-2
https://git-scm.com/docs/gitcore-tutorial